Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Joy

• Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Night, Oysters, Joy

• Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lying, Tired, Blessing

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, VIII: The End of the World, 1925.

• Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Grief, Inspiration, Joy

• Surprise is the secret of joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Joy, Secret, Surprise

• Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Grief, Men, Joy

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

• Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Grief, Holiday

  "Orthodoxy". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

• Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Sadness, Men

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

• We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Joy, Contentment, Castles

• Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Joy, Secret

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

• The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Caring, Thinking

• We actually love ourselves more than we love joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Joy

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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